


not running from

by 1001cranes



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Future Fic, Kid Fic, M/M, Married Couple, Miscommunication, background Isaac/Braeden, background Lydia/OMC, background Scott/Allison, but not so bad you'll want to rip your face off promise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-04
Updated: 2014-08-04
Packaged: 2018-02-11 16:33:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2075196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1001cranes/pseuds/1001cranes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone knows if you don’t ignore about seventy-five percent of the crap that comes out of Stiles’s mouth on a daily basis, you’d never get anything done besides going completely insane.</p><p>Or: Derek totally misses the baby hints and ends up in hot water.</p>
            </blockquote>





	not running from

**Author's Note:**

> future fic written during S3 when Allison was still alive and kicking butt and I was totally enamored with the way Isaac looked at Braeden.
> 
> based on [this gifset](http://werelinski.tumblr.com/post/70018778286/sterek-au-stiles-cant-help-but-notice-how-good)

Everyone knows if you don’t ignore about seventy-five percent of the crap that comes out of Stiles’s mouth on a daily basis, you’d never get anything done besides going completely insane.

[“At least eighty-five percent on a bad day,” Scott confides once. “Maybe ninety. Sometimes it’s just —” and he makes a little whoosh noise. “On another level.”

"No filter," Allison says knowingly. 

“ _Weird_  connections,” Scott counters. “You think you’re talking about lacrosse practice and he’s brain deep in the French Revolutionary Wars.”

"I —"

"Don’t ask," Scott says, fervently. " _Never_  ask.”]

It’s not that Stiles fails at communicating, exactly. He’s pretty good at asking for things, he’s really good at saying no (“You want to hear it in Polish?  _Nie_.”), and he leaves little to the imagination in bed. But Derek has learned the hard way - the deeply embarrassing way, the oh-god-strike-this-from-the-record-not-even-mentioned-in-a-deathbed-confession way - that just because something is coming out of Stiles’s mouth doesn’t mean he’s had more than a passing thought about it. 

This is, in essence, Derek’s entire defense for missing the baby clues. Ignoring, to be fair.  _Ignoring_  the baby clues. Sometimes with Stiles it’s a little hard to separate the sheep from the goats. 

(“Separate the what from the  _what_? What are you, Australian?” “Wheat from the chaff, is that American enough for you?” “It’s Biblical.” “Keep this up and I’m going to find a Bible to  _hit you with_.” “Kinky!”)

In retrospect, it starts when Braeden and Isaac have their first kid. Braeden is back on the job at the Sheriff’s office in record time, but as Isaac is a ‘lazy freelancing bum with too much time on his hands’, he brings Brooke in to see her mommy everyday after lunch. The Sheriff is always coincidentally getting a coffee refill, and Derek always ends up holding the baby while the Sheriff stands by cooing and Isaac and Braeden discuss how much Brooke has pooped today, or whatever. It’s stupidly adorable, somehow, and Derek can’t help  _beaming_  down at Brooke, who is sweet-smelling and tufty-haired and probably not a werewolf, Derek thinks, though it won’t be certain for a few years yet.

"Put those chompers  _away_ ,” Stiles says, when he breezes in. He’s still trying to feed his dad vegetables; good luck. “How is that not scaring my ittle Brookie?”, voice going from booming to high and babyish in the space of a sentence. “Is the big werewolf scaring you with his  _teeths?”_

"Babies love me," Derek says absently, and jostles Brooke up and down while she gurgles. He was the second oldest of four, plus a handful of cousins. He knows his way around babies. 

"Yeah," Stiles says after a weird pause. "They totally do."

Then Brooke spits up on Derek’s shirt.

| |

By the time Derek gets the spit-up off his shirt - “Is it actually impossible for you to keep your shirt on around me?” Braeden asks - someone has called in an 11-14, which Derek has to check up on just to be sure whoever was bitten only needs a rabies shot and not a crash course in the supernatural.

When he gets there the mother is hysterical and her teenage son is poking at his bleeding arm with a fairly disturbing level of interest, but at least the air only smells like regular dog. Derek spends his afternoon calming down the mother - not his strong suit - getting someone to bring the son to the hospital, calling animal control, citing the neighbor, and filling out a stack of paperwork.

All of a sudden it’s half past five before Derek even texts Stiles to ask if he can bring Thai home instead of taking his turn cooking. 

 _I want EXTRA CURRY PUFFS_  Stiles texts back.  _BRING ME CURRY PUFFS!_

 _you’re a menace,_ Derek sends back a half hour later, along with a picture of the takeout bag.  _set the table?_  

_for you mon amour I will break out the fine china. aka actual plates._

"Bringing out the big guns tonight," Derek says when Stiles meets him at the door. "Did you break the coffee table again?"

"Fuck you, that has happened exactly twice. And _no,_  we’re eating in the living room because I’m marathoning Modern Family.”

Derek shrugs. Stiles’s viewing habits are about as eclectic as his topics of conversation. Comedy shows, cooking shows, supernatural shows -  _”_ Why did they even  _make_  a Blade TV series,” Derek asks, desperately, while Stiles cackles - dramas, foreign miniseries; the only thing that would surprise Derek at this point would be if Stiles wanted to rewatch that RealDoll documentary, which gave him nightmares for weeks.

Derek devours his drunken noodles in record time and steals two of Stiles’s curry puffs before Stiles crams the rest in his mouth; he should have gotten extra shrimp rolls. He forgets that Stiles still eats like a teenager.

"This is cool though, right?" Stiles asks after they watch a few episodes. "I mean, two dudes adopting a baby. Kind of groundbreaking at the time. Though obviously it’s still two well-off white dudes, and I’ve got a lot of thoughts about transethnic adoption, especially from someplace like Vietnam - I don’t think they even let people from America do that anymore, to be honest, as a country we’re kind of assholes - but it’s cool, right?”

"Right," Derek says absently, because this sounds about the same as every other Stiles version of verbal white noise. Plus he’s pretty sure Isaac has made him watch this show before, and he’s thinks that Lily kid might end up possessed by some kind of demon. "The Lion King bit was funny." He doesn’t like this whole mockumentary angle but he can suffer through for Sofia Vergara if Stiles is going to try and watch the whole season in one go.

"Yeah," Stiles says. "That would be the bit you focused on," which makes Derek narrow his eyes, because is this a werewolf-cub crack? 

Stiles gets stuck on Modern Family for a week or two, then selected episodes of Queer as Folk, a couple of Lifetime themed movies, and a few indie flicks with ‘moody’ lighting that give Derek headaches from how much he strains to see. He watches with half an eye instead, and curls up at the end of the couch with  _East of Eden_ or  _White Fang_ , which never fails to give Stiles mocking material. 

"Go on!" Stiles says, and shoves at Derek with his feet. "Go on now, go! Go back to your kind!"

"People who cut their toenails?" Derek asks, and pushes Stiles off the end of the couch.

| |

Things start to get crazy when Lydia comes back to Beacon Hills for a visit.

"I think we can come out for at least two weeks," Lydia says the minute Derek picks up his cell. "Michael has a lot of vacation time built up and I’m contemplating lining my thesis advisor’s water bottle with the new strain of wolfsbane Allison brought back from Antigua."

"Don’t," Derek says. "We’re on a streak."

"It’s been almost a year since anyone in the pack got arrested!" Isaac shouts from across the room, because apparently there’s no such thing as a private cell phone conversation when werewolves are around.

Lydia sniffs. “It’s not like I’d let it show up on a  _tox screen,_ " but then she launches right into a debate about whether the local B&B has enough space or maybe she should just bite the bullet and stay with her parents, so poisoning is probably off the table. The rest of the conversation doesn’t require much more than making interested noises and agreeing with everything she says - Lydia and Cora are frighteningly alike in some ways, and Derek is well trained - and noting down the dates for her trip on the calendar. 

"Tell Allison Scott isn’t allowed to knock her up before then, I want a girls night out!" are Lydia’s final words before she hangs up on him. And Derek is definitely not repeating that.

"Lydia’s coming back?" Stiles guesses. "You’ve got those weird little wrinkles in your forehead again."

"I do not have  _wrinkles_.”

"Stress wrinkles," Isaac agrees. "Jackson gives you those too, but you also sometimes get weepy."

"Fuck you both," Derek says agreeably. "Where the hell is Scott?" He whines if they start watching movies without him.

"Probably trying to knock Allison up," Stiles says, and Isaac snickers.

| |

Lydia usually comes back to Beacon Hills once or twice a year. Her husband is a global energy consultant whose family lives in Maine, and they try to split their vacations and holidays as fairly as they can. They live near Boston because Lydia refused to get her PhD anywhere else. “It’s  _MIT_ ,” she’d argued. “Where else am I going to get a doctorate in Applied Mathematics with access to polymer science labs? Not Akron!” She’s the only member of the pack that had stayed away after college, the only one whose stayed away for so long, and the entire pack basically mobs her the minute she steps out of the airport gate.

"Oh my god," she says. "You all need to stop sniffing my hair at once." 

"Never!" Stiles yells. He and Derek came at her from one side and Isaac from the front, beaming, has his arms around her waist to lift her right off her toes.

"Scott and Allison send their regrets, by the way," Isaac says. He’s so much taller than Lydia his face is pressed into the top of her head, but its mostly understandable. "Allison couldn’t get off work, and Scott figured he’d stay on guard."  They’d found out the hard way that every member of the pack leaving Beacon Hills was usually a cosmic invitation for trouble. 

"I’m mortally offended," Lydia says, and sniffles.

Behind them Braeden is being the normal one and helping Michael with his bags. Michael is, thankfully, used to werewolf shenanigans at this point, and doesn’t look at all put out over three guys trying to lift his wife up to carry her away.

"Let me know if you need a rescue," Michael tells Lydia, nonchalant. He’s got Natalie strapped to his chest and a baby bag slung over his shoulder; he looks a little frazzled, the way most travelers do, but his smile is soft. 

"UNCLE DEREK!" Alexander shrieks, and wrenches away from his father’s hand. Derek has to let go of Lydia in order to catch the small child trying to scrabble up his legs.

"Hey kiddo," he says, grabbing Alex under his armpits and wrangling him to sit up against Derek’s hip. "You’re  _huge_.” Alex is taller than he was at Christmas, heavier, though less chubby-cheeked. 

Alex grins at him; he’s missing a few bottom teeth too. “I’m five now. And I’m a  _giant_ ,” he says. “I’m going to grind your bones to make my bread!”

"I see my book of fairy tales was totally a hit," Stiles chips in, smugly.

"Stop gloating," Lydia says. "I got a call from his teacher last week because he told her he was angry enough to rip himself in half." Stiles still has one hand on the middle of Lydia’s back; Derek still remembers when that would have sent him into spin cycles of jealousy, guilt, anger, guilt again. Stiles is looking at Derek though, watching Alex reach up to rub his hand against Derek’s beard.

"You’re all prickly!" Alex says. "Are we staying at your house?" He’s got both hands hooked in the collar of Derek’s shirt. It’s going to stretch, but Derek can’t even pretend to care.

"We’re staying with grandma and grandpa, sweetie. Let’s stop strangling Derek, okay?" Lydia says, and holds her arms out.

"Okayyyyy," Alex agrees, flopping back, and Lydia busses his cheek when Derek dutifully hands him over.

"My little monster," she says, and Alex beams. 

Lydia openly  _adores_ her children. It throws some people off, Derek knows; people who can’t reconcile the driven genius from high school with the married Ph.D candidate, people who might have assumed Lydia would just think children got in the way of what she wanted to achieve - “Please,” he remembers her saying once. “I graduated from high school with a 5.0 after surviving at  _least_  seven different supernatural attempts on my life _._  I’ll have as many children as I damn well want.” - or that she’d view them as her little 2.0s, better versions of herself to mold as she pleased. But she loves them exactly for them. She reminds Derek a lot of his mother, really. Unwilling to change an iota of herself for her children, but with the reverse holding true as well. 

"You can come over later," Derek says. "We’ll make cookies," and Alex’s eyes widen like Derek just promised the entire _Rapture_ about the same time Natalie starts wailing.

"Sorry," Michael says. "Sorry, sorry." He’s jostling the baby carrier up and down with one hand. "She’s teething, and we’re out of Orajel. I don’t suppose anyone could —"

"Someone work their werewolf voodoo," Lydia says bluntly. 

"I’ve got one of my own now!" Isaac says, and Braeden gives Michael a look, as if to say ‘can you believe we voluntarily married into this?’ 

"Congratulations," Lydia says. "I’d say it gets easier but it’s a lie. Now come help me find our luggage." 

"I’ve got Natalie," Derek says, which is how he ends up smushed in the back of the Jeep on the ride home, tucked next to Natalie’s car seat so she can chomp happily on his finger. 

| |

"Can you take the kids for the night?" Lydia asks when she calls a few days later. She sounds - frazzled. 

"Sure," Derek says. "What’s up?"

"Short story, my parents are insane," she says. "Slightly longer story, my dad’s being an asshole and I don’t want to yell at him in front of my kids if push comes to scream."

"Need me to come get them?" Derek asks. Lydia doesn’t have a  _bad_  relationship with her parents, exactly, but they seem to fundamentally misunderstand her on some level. There’s usually at least one blowup every time she comes to visit.

"No, no," she sighs. "It’s the least I can do. That, and Michael and I might need to crash in your spare bedroom after all this is over."

| |

"You weren’t doing anything tonight?" Lydia asks later when she drops the kids off. Derek is holding Natalie’s carrier just inside the doorway, while Alex had zoomed into the house immediately and made a beeline for the living room, where Stiles had How to Train Your Dragon queued up. "I know Allison and Scott had plans —"

Derek smirks. “Stiles and I prefer to spend our Fridays in.”

"Ugh."

"You’re just jealous!" Stiles yells. "You and your boring married se— stuff, married stuff!"

"You had better not teach my kid any new words, Stilinski!"

Derek snorts. “Stiles’s mouth will be too full of cookies later to bother.”

"Not where I thought that sentence was going," Lydia chirps, which makes Derek blush and tighten his hold on Natalie’s carrier. "Be good Alex!"

"I promise!" Alex yells back, lisping a little over the ‘r’, and Lydia darts back to the rental car sitting on the curb.

"That woman is a menace," Stiles starts, only to have Alex shush him.

"The dragons are about to attack!" He’s sitting next to Stiles on the sofa, feet tucked up under so he can curl under Stiles’s arm. He looks smaller that way, tinier and younger. "The dragons are the best _.”_

"One day you and I are going to watch Game of Thrones together, buddy," Stiles says, softly. "It’s gonna be  _great,_ " and Derek turns around to put Natalie’s carrier and baby bag in the bathroom, because the stupid amount of affection he has for the stupid dork in the other room threatens to knock him off his feet sometimes.

| |

Alex passes out on the couch by 8:30, even with all the chocolate chip cookie sugar rushing through this veins.

"All the excitement," Stiles says. "Or maybe jetlag. You can still be jetlagged after a couple days, right?"

"You used to sleep for a straight  _day_  after you got off a plane,” Derek says. 

"That was after finals, and I was probably hungover," Stiles counters shamelessly. "I’m going to go put him in the spare bedroom." 

"Sounds good." Derek’s feeding Natalie her second bottle of the night. Lydia didn’t leave a third, so hopefully this will tide her over until Lydia or Michael pick her up. "You need help?" 

"I can handle 45 pounds of sleepy child, thank you very much. I held your muscled butt up in a pool for two hours, didn’t I?"

"Sweet talker."

"Damn straight," Stiles says, and leans down to cradle Alex’s head and flop him back against Stiles’s shoulder. "Come on, little guy. Let’s get you to bed."

| |

By the time Stiles gets Alex tucked in. Natalie has finished her bottle and burped, and is blinking up at Derek placidly. Her eyes are still dark newborn blue, nebulous, and Derek runs one finger down the her nose and bops the tip, just to make her gurgle and smile. 

Stiles hooks his chin on Derek’s shoulder and stares down at her too.

"You’re like the baby whisperer," Stiles says after a few minutes. "And I know it’s not a werewolf thing this time, so don’t even try."

Derek shrugs. “You’re not so bad yourself.” And Stiles isn’t. He’d just about freaked out the first time he’d held Alex, but it was about 30% inexperience from being an only child and 70% Stiles freaking out about his inexperience, as per usual. 

"I guess we’d do okay," Stiles says. And then - "With a baby, I mean. Obviously we do okay already."

"We’re good," Derek says, turning his head to rub his nose against Stiles’s cheek and breathe him in. 

"We’re  _great_ ,” Stiles says. “Number one couple, right here!” and Natalie babbles like she agrees.

| |

Over the next few weeks Stiles starts dropping hints. Or what are hints in retrospect, but at the time don’t even register on Derek’s Stiles-is-being-weird meter, which is generally fine-tuned but does, admittedly, have some blind spots.

"It was nice having the kids over," Stiles says at lunch. "Wasn’t it nice?" and Derek grunts in agreement. "It’d be cool if they were here all the time."

"You know Lydia won’t move back until she finishes her degree," Derek says. She’d been really, really adamant about that. "Speaking of. What time’s their send-off dinner at Scott’s tonight - was it 7?"

Stiles sighs. “I think 6.”

| |

"It’s good that we already have a two bedroom," Stiles says. "I was thinking about that the other night, when Alex was here. He just looked so cute." 

"Kids are always cute when they’re asleep," Derek says wryly. "My mom used to say that about Cora a lot." Stiles is making the face now, the do-I-ask-about-Derek’s-family-or-shut-up-and-listen? face. "To be fair that probably still applies to Cora."

"Somewhere in Venezuela she feels the urge to hit you and doesn’t know why," Stiles says sweetly.

| | 

Two days later Derek finds Stiles in the spare bedroom, standing on the bed and looking around critically. “This would look good green, right? Or yellow? Something unisex.”

"It’s already brown," Derek says, puzzled. Is brown not unisex these days?

| |

(Derek totally takes the blame for the last one.)

"I think my dad wants grandkids," Stiles declares. "What do you think?"

Derek snorts into his coffee. “I think he’d kidnap Brooke given half a chance.” Lord knows Isaac and Braeden will never need to find a babysitter.

| |

Then Derek finds the pamphlets on adoption stuffed into Stiles’s sock drawer.

He - oh.  _Oh._

| |

The first thing Derek does when his brain stops rebooting is slam Stiles’s sock drawer shut hard enough to rattle the entire dresser.

The second thing he does is call Scott.

"Hey—"

"Does Stiles want kids?" Derek asks.  

There’s a very long pause on the other end of the line.

"I’m going out on a limb and guessing you’re asking the wrong person that question," Scott says.

Derek huffs. There are still times he kind of hates Scott’s brand of kinder, gentler Alpha. He’s not sure that would ever totally change. They’d finally started to sort their shit out when Derek and Stiles had begun dating, and the whole awful rollercoaster had started back up again. And what happened to a straight answer anyway? - hell, Derek would prefer to be  _told_  yes or no and then raise hell about it as needed.

"I can hear you rolling your eyes at me!" Scott shouts suddenly, sounding betrayed, and this time Derek rolls his eyes for real.

"Excuse  _me_  for thinking you’d know anything about your best friend.”

"He’s your boyfriend, Derek! You can’t just—"

Derek knows he shouldn’t have made the best friend crack. He knows better. The pack had poked, prodded, bribed, dragged, dared, tricked, and just generally shoved Derek into enough therapy sessions to make him what Cora had finally declared ‘a functioning werewolf and sometimes human being’: Stiles had made him a card.

"Has he said anything?" Derek interrupts. "About kids. Recently."

Scott pauses. “He was kind of picking mom’s brain about surrogacy the other night, but I didn’t really think too much about it. You know how he is.”

Derek makes a grunt of agreement. That’s basically what put him in this mess in the first place.

"And we - " Scott hesitates. "Allison and I have been  _trying_ , you know,” and Derek manfully resists the urge to tell Scott yes, they all know, they have all stumbled across them ‘trying’ at one point or another; “But so far no luck, and it’s - it kind of gets at you, after a while. So Stiles and I talk about it sometimes. I figured he was just being Stiles.”

"Okay," Derek says after a moment. "Thanks."

"Talk to him," Scott warns, and then hangs up.

| |

Derek thinks about calling John for half a second, but since the Sheriff does not currently have the ability to be rational about grandchildren, that’s out. Running to your sort of father-in-law is probably best left as a last resort anyway. 

Derek practically collapses into the couch when he realizes they’re going to have to  _talk about it._ Derek doesn’t want to talk about it. Derek rarely wants to talk about  _anything_. Stiles has slowly become the take charge one - Stiles does the thing, and Derek accepts the change or doesn’t, and either way its sorted. Somedays he misses his family so hard it hurts. Not just because they were his family and he loved them, but because he knew what to expect from them, what was expected from  _himself._

It’s too much to expect Stiles to just come home with a baby one afternoon, right?

| |

After a few minutes Derek pulls himself together enough to finish up the laundry. He thinks about making something for dinner, easing Stiles into talking about it over burgers or maybe lasagna, but Stiles comes home, looks at Derek for a millisecond, and says, “Oh god what is it?”, which pretty much kills the soft approach.

"Do you want kids?" Derek asks, because it’s like pulling out an arrow or digging out a bullet - you have to do it, quickly, before anything can get any better. Or shit can get any worse.

Stiles’s face does something complicated Derek can’t entirely decipher. “No,” he says weakly, and they can both hear the lie. Lying to werewolves is never foolproof, but Stiles knows enough by now to have at least made a better attempt of it.

Derek does him the favor of not calling out the lie, though his raised eyebrows probably say it all.

"Okay!" Stiles says, and throws up his hands. It knocks the messenger bag off his shoulder, and it hits the ground with a thump. "Okay, yes, I want kids, but it’s not the hill I want this relationship to die on, so I let it drop!" _  
_

"Why would you —"

"You didn’t want to talk about it! You never wanted to talk about it! You’re the king of deflection!" 

"I didn’t  _know_  we were talking about it!” Derek yells back, because yup, they’re yelling now. “I thought we were talking about - about Lydia’s kids, and Brooke, and the  _spare room!_ At no point did you say ‘hey, do you want kids? Do you want to have kids  _with me_?”

Stiles’s mouth drops open. “I was - it was recon, like. I was  _feeling you out_ , like the time with the handcuffs!” and that throws Derek off the topic at hand, because the time with the handcuffs was a fairly memorable moment, yeah. “You were so good with them, I thought maybe -” Stiles flings his hands towards Derek in a little rocking gestures that Derek takes to mean —

"I'm not going to just  _come home_ with a baby!"

"But you’re so good with them!" Stiles whines. "You’d probably just - walk into an orphanage and the babies would stop crying and the nuns would make you leave with three!"

"That’s not - "

“ _I know that’s not how it works_!” Stiles snaps. “Ugh. You are so —” His nostrils flare. He bends down to pick up his bag and throw it back over his shoulder, jerky and disjointed. “It’s not a  _dealbreaker_ , okay, I’m not saying get me a baby or I’m hitting the highway, I just —”“ and there are a thousand ways that sentence could end and Derek isn’t sure he likes any of them.

So what comes out of his mouth is: ”I want kids.”

Stiles stops.

"I want kids with you," Derek clarifies, because after - after the fire, after everything, he stopped thinking about his future for a long time. He hasn’t though about it in a long time, actually, hasn’t really thought about Stiles and kids on a  _conscious_  level, but he knows how he felt when he found those pamphlets in Stiles’s drawer. Like he’d missed something, or screwed something up. Not like Stiles was asking for something he couldn’t give.

"You better not just be saying that," Stiles says, and his throat clicks. "Because I will  _kill you_.”

Derek’s lips quirk. His hands have already found Stiles’s, clutching tightly, and if they’re slightly clammy Stiles has developed enough emotional sensitivity not to call him out on it.

"I found the pamphlets in your sock drawer," Derek confesses after a moment of manfully reigning in his emotions. "You could walk me through it." If Stiles hasn’t already researched every aspect of every possible method of adoption Derek would down a wolfsbane smoothie.

Stiles flushes. “I might have made a powerpoint.”

Of course he did.


End file.
